


Unwritten

by palimpsestus



Category: Gilmore Girls
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-03
Updated: 2017-06-03
Packaged: 2018-11-08 07:38:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,875
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11077029
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/palimpsestus/pseuds/palimpsestus
Summary: For almost seven years, I drafted my relationship with Jess Mariano, and tried to craft something from the patchwork of late night meetings and single beds. For seven years, Jess detailed us perfectly in the things he never wrote.





	Unwritten

**May 2009**

This could be the start of a column. It occurred to me later, but the idea belonged entirely to the sticky little bedsit in DC, where Jess’s hips were frantically rocking against mine. This feeling would echo in the hearts of all women. The mistake I could make over and over and never learn from. The terrifying drop I would rush towards like a child to a roller coaster, because the drop into nothing was the best part. Not all women would find themselves in a bed of salt sweat and tangling their fingers in black curls, but all women would know that draw towards the path not taken.

Jess made love like he was afraid I was going to leave at any moment, like he thought he had to be better than anyone – _everyone_ \-  else. Jess gave everything of himself and I lay back against the sparsely filled mattress and luxuriated in feeling so worshipped. If we had been in a noir film, we’d have finished by striking a match and drawing on a hand rolled cigarette, but we were not. We lay on the narrow bed, trying not to touch to keep our scalding skins apart, and yet our shoulders brushed, our skin bonding with the sweat beading on our bodies.

“That was nice,” Jess breathed, and I could hear the penny drop on the worn lino before he jerked upwards, resting his weight on his elbows, “Not that it wasn’t, I mean, it was excellent, amazing . . .”

I laughed so hard I hiccupped and coughed and snorted through my nose. Jess ineffectively batted at my arm until I was a wreck curled around his side, my sides aching and my cheeks in agony, while Jess murmured ever more flowery accolades into my ear.

“Do you have to go?” he whispered, one hand peeling strands of hair from my damp neck.

Did I? The suitcase was packed and the rent on this hideous apartment was all paid up. The next stage of my career stretched out in front of me, a long climb up the ticking track of the rollercoaster. And to lie here, with Jess, was a swoop downwards into the abyss, to weightlessness and excitement . . . and the end of the ride would be sooner, rather than later.

“I have to go,” I told him. “But this _was_ nice.”

 

 

**April** **2010**

I had forgotten about the column I would never write until I was stranded in Dublin with no luggage, no visa and a rapidly dwindling coffee fund because of a volcano I could neither pronounce nor pinpoint on a map. I was standing in a bookshop, some British . . . or Irish . . . or maybe just European brand that still carried the stamp of ‘bookshop’ and therefore ‘home’ and I saw _it_.

In the column I would never write, I would admit that I had spent hours browsing the shelves, pausing occasionally to sample old friends. I would detail the thrill when I saw a familiar dark-navy jacket staring at me from the bargain bin.

I sacrificed two coffees to purchase my third copy of _The Subsect_ , and I waited out the volcanic cloud reading the exposed parts of Mariano’s soul and I made my notes in the margins.

I intended to write sensible notes, for the next time I saw him, perhaps a Christmas time in Stars Hollow, to hand the copy over across the counter at Luke’s. But my pen traced out instead my memories of his gasps and the indentations his fingers left against my ribs, the vivid red of his tongue at the corner of his mouth as he laboured for me. I filled the lines between Ella and Owen with recollections of Jess’s shirt clinging to his chest, of warm summer evenings by the lake, and when Owen finally admitted Ella was his daughter and he would always look out for her, I penned an ode to the time Jess had once put a whole wake together for his uncle.

I chewed the end of my pen to plastic shards in my mouth.

 

 

**September 2010**

I sent a text. “The end of the Iraq war has inflamed my left-wing tendencies. I need a beatnik dalliance to remind me of my WASP roots.”

I refused to take the time to consider the text, to stew over the wording. I sent it and damned the consequences.

Jess drove to Boston and arrived at my apartment that night, with pizza from New York that we reheated under the grill while I explained his appearance to my roommate as a coincidence.

We ate. We discussed the Millennium Trilogy sitting on my bedroom floor – “Pseudo feminist bullshit, it’s exploitative at best” (him) and Solar lying fully clothed on my bed – “A old white man’s midlife crisis wrapped up in the end of the planet, because what’s more important than some rich guys junk than the planet?” (me).

And then, his fingers entwined around mine, staring at our hands together, he asked “Do you wanna?”

“Well last time was nice,” I agreed.

And the second time was just as nice.

 

**February 2011**

Jess called me, his ringtone was “I Fought the Law” and it played during a dinner with the Huntzbergers. I excused myself from them and stood in a grand marble arched reception, listening to the invite to come, to join him and his car and his roadtrip through America.

“I’m with Logan,” I whispered, the echoes of my words bouncing off the veined stone.

The pause was slight. “So?” he said after a moment, talking around marbles in his mouth.

“So . . .” I wondered at that myself. It didn’t seem to matter much really. “I’m working,” I decided instead. And this felt like the truth. “I have a good thing going at the Globe. I can’t leave it yet.”

“Yet,” he mused.

“Yet,” I agreed.

“Okay.”

 

**November 2011**

He started a blog that was quickly picked up as a column. His written column mirrored my unwritten one. He sent me the first few clippings until I told him I subscribed (an interaction carried out entirely safely, and entirely publicly, on Twitter) and he asked for my opinion.

He had always had talent, and he had always been good. Raw, yes. Raw, still. But he must have been listening to that editor over at the Seattle Times. He improved week by week. He peppered stories of his misspent youth as a hooligan in New York with rare glimpses of a very happy time in an unnamed town in Connecticut. He contrasted these with the broken and sometimes bleak industrial towns of Flyover, USA that he visited on his travels.

I read religiously, devoured his growth, and I loved the odd glimpses of fiction he showed off in the neatly printed lines. It was fiction where he shone, fiction where he came alive, was able to right the wrongs.

He was like an Atwood or Proulx, ripping away at a small unnoticed thread until the whole thing came unravelled. And all because of the thread.

And then comes the piece about working in diners.

It is perfect.

I will never write something so true, because I have no talent for fiction. I cannot massage the truth into a rose tinted view of Americana that manages to reflect our reality while still evoking that perfect image in the mind’s eye. He talks about memorising the orders of the regulars, an intimacy that has followed him to every diner he’s pulled a shift in, how he judges their coffee. He describes a pretty girl in Arizona, on her way to start her postgraduate degree and stopping off in a dust covered ‘wagon’. He flirts with her for a full shift and more than one pot of coffee, learns about her future, learns about her past, and he talks about feeling safe while he is on the service side of the counter, how he could never be invited to dine at her rich grandparent’s house, how she would only ever think of him as the curiously literate drifter she once met at a forgettable diner on a lonely numbered road.

And then the scales would fall from the reader’s eyes. For weeks, the piece was all anyone talked about. In my circles, anyway. Grandma was telling the DAR she’d had the writer to dine with her, and he’d been a perfect gentleman. Editorialising perhaps. Even Logan admitted he thought it was good.

Even Mom.

The diner piece ended with Jess leaving the diner to move on to the next adventure, freed from the drudgery of the American class system by his intelligence, the luck of having had a good uncle, the accent that made him fit in when he was slumming it, but the upbringing that let him fit in at the dinner table, and of course his colour too.

It was everywhere. Or everywhere in the print anyway. I saw him interviewed by some indie show on YouTube. I heard his voice on late night radio. I was so fiercely proud.

 

**December 2011**

That Christmas was a good one. Mom and Luke were in a good place. Grandpa and Grandma were in a good place. Mom was in a good place with Grandpa and Grandma. Jess was in a good place with Luke. And I was in a good place with Logan. And so we had a Christmas meal at the inn, all of us, Sookie and Jackson, Grandma and Grandpa, Mom and Luke, Logan and me, Jess and his girlfriend Siobhan.

Siobhan was smart. Beautiful in a west coast alternative kind of a way – Mom sang Nirvana songs when she entered a room – and Siobhan brought us obscure roasts from her favourite independent shops. I loved her instantly, and I wished that I was not going to sleep with her boyfriend at some point during the season.

But I knew that I would. Jess was happy and relaxed. He’d made something of himself that he was proud of. It helped, though he probably didn’t know it himself, that he was also now respectable by society’s standards too. He was an eccentric, heartfelt writer now, and that made his failings more tolerable. He was not short tempered he was brilliant. He was not rude he was witty.

All the things my mother was herself.

And so the dinner was wonderful, in the newly award winning Dragonfly Inn, with all those people I cared about. And we drank sparkling wine and brandy in the bar, and somehow I found myself back in the restaurant, the lights dimmed, following Jess on my tiptoes.

“Hey?” he said when he heard me approaching. “I was just - ”

A stolen kiss at Christmas is its own present. I tangled my fingers in his curls, grasped the arm that immediately encircled my waist, and leaned up, hungry for more. I wanted to be in one of the most comfortable beds in Hartford (-The Connecticut Traveller, 2011) and I wanted to be the centre of his world for an hour or so, to add another little notch in the bedpost that was reserved entirely for the genius, misunderstood writer – proof that I was able to match him.

And he gently pushed me back. “Rory . . .”

“What?” I whispered through lowered lashes, pushing against his outstretched arms. “Jess, you know . . .”

“No,” he whispered, and when I stopped pushing forward he stopped pushing me away. “Rory,” he glanced over my shoulder, back to the rest of the party, hidden behind the doors. “What are you doing?”

“You left the party?” I could hear how confused I sounded, and I hated myself for it.

“To . . . catch my breath,” he shrugged, regarding me with such sympathy I wanted to slap him.

“You mean you don’t want to?”

Jess did. But Jess wouldn’t, not while Siobhan was in the other room. Not while she was laughing at Logan’s jokes, and accepting another glass of prosecco from my grandmother.

Jess wouldn’t.

 

**March 2012**

I took a job in Seoul.

I hated my job in Seoul.

I hated the heat, the humidity, I hated Skype chats with my mother and missing all the newest movies. I hated the food, which tasted nothing like Mrs Kim’s cooking. I hated my tiny apartment and my out of date cellphone. I hated my editor. I hated what I wrote. I hated the travel whenever an American correspondent was needed.

I hated it all.

 

**August 2012**

I wound up back in Stars Hollow, jobless and hurting. Jess wrote a column about heartbreak, losing the person you loved, the feelings of worthlessness that suffused you.

I wondered if perhaps it wasn’t that he got _me_ so much as he just got people.

I thought of trying to capture my feelings as perfectly as he had, of grinding them down to a perfectly cut diamond, honing off the rough edges until everyone could see every facet of my heart.

So I started blogging.

How ordinary.

 

**November 2012**

A viral news site wanted to republish one of my blog posts – the one about discovering I was not cut out for my childhood dreams. Seoul Searching.

I said yes.

I watched the hit count rise all night from my mother’s living room, huddled over my laptop. I read the comments, I looked at the outlinking, I felt my fingers poised over the keyboard and I felt a curious thrumming in my stomach.

 

**February 2013**

“It’s hardly journalism though,” Mitch said, and I felt as though I’d been in this exact same room, having this exact same argument. “A few pictures and some witty comments? It’s hardly even the New Yorker.”

Logan watches me worriedly as I sit serenely at the dining table.

“Yes but I’m thinking of becoming one of the staffwriters,” I heard my voice say, bright and airy.

“Well . . . that seems like a good match for you.”

“I think it is,” I said, and I smiled at Logan’s mother. “Would you please pass the potatoes?”

 

**June 2013**

“Are you dating her?”

Mitch Huntzberger’s voice always carried, always pierced any semblance of armour I had created. I stood motionless in the bedroom, my toes straining against the hardwood floorboards, desperately trying to keep my balance off of the squeaky joist.

“Who?” Logan sounded tense and tight, the kind of painful anger that sometimes I heard in my mother’s voice when she spoke to Grandma.

If Mitch was to explore his son’s bedroom, he’d find tangled sheets and me, half dressed – and not the better half either.

“Rory Gilmore.” Mitch was soft. I imagined him looming over his son. “Son . . . we need to know.”

Yes, they needed to know. My left big toe ached from keeping my heels off the squeaking board. My heart thumped against the t-shirt I clutched to my chest.

“She’s a friend, you know that. Not that it’s any of your business, but I’m not about to marry her, am I?”

Low, and angry, Mitch asked, “Are you?”

“ _No_ , dad, Jesus . . .”

I’m not the one you marry, am I?

 

 

**January 2015**

Somewhere in the last few years I stopped thinking about that column. The thousands of words I’d written in my head about longing, about home, about the seduction of uncertainty, they fell away into the river of time.

Until I was lying in bed with a charming young man and got an email from Jess. I rolled to my other side, hid my phone under the bedcovers, and read: “I need your help – I can’t get this to flow. Please. I’m going to drink myself to death”.

So . . . I read the attachment.

After the first page I couldn’t lie beneath the sheets with Paul, while I read the soul of America’s Next Greatest Writer. It wasn’t hyperbole. Sure, the piece was barely finished, but it was awe inspiring. It was rough, rougher than I’d seen from Jess in years, but I curled up with my laptop on the sofa, staring into its harsh glow. His story was about a woman in Seattle, and in this excerpt, she drifted from the grey seas to the drizzling rainforests, seeking answers about her long dead grandmother.

By the time Paul had woken and brought me coffee, I sent Jess my edits. They were brutal, honest, and I felt bone weary as I hit the ‘send’ button. I drank my coffee from Paul, listened to the radio, and nearly jumped out of my skin when his email came back in return.

“Thank you – you’re the best editor I’ve ever had. Thanks!!!”

I told Paul I was going to catch up on some sleep.

 

**September 2015**

The latest snippet from Jess’s piece was sitting in my inbox, while I was drumming my fingers off a copy of The New Yorker and watching the people on the subway. I wanted to grab them, shake them, shout about my little think piece.

Look, I wanted to say to them, I can do it too. I can write!

It took every ounce of my soul to put the words to paper, and now I am a shell of a human being . . .

The subway carriage jolted, and my fingers crumpled the page against my thigh.

It wasn’t fair. Damn it, I wanted to be good. And I could be good, but it was never natural. It never flowed from me like I could see it flow from Jess’s fingers. What I read from Jess was so much more honest than I could ever be. Jess wrote about small town life, the vagaries and the intricacies of knowing absolutely everyone in the grocery queue. Jess would write about serving coffee to the woman he’d seen picking up a pregnancy test from the pharmacy. Jess would write about affairs that everyone knew were happening but no one wanted to discuss.

I was the woman no one named but everyone knew.

The thought made me shift again, sweat sticking to the back of my neck as the subway car jostled.

What are you doing with your life, Gilmore? You’re sleeping with a man who has no intention of ever committing to you, and you’re fucking around with a perfectly nice person who doesn’t deserve your neglect.

And I waited for the sporadic, out of sequence snippets from Jess’s next novel, imagining myself as his heroine, knowing that I wasn’t.

What the fuck am I?

With the New Yorker pressed against my thigh, the print sticking to my clammy hands, I can say with authority I am no writer. I might barely be a journalist. Sitting in my WhatsApp was a message to Logan, desperately trying to subtly tease out what he thought of the piece. It couldn’t send on the subway. Maybe that’s why I wrote it when I sat on the crowded train. To give myself time to delete it.

On Twitter, somewhere out there in the sky, was Jess’s effluent praise for my writing. In our little circle of the arty types who retweet and subtweet and write opinion pieces, Jess is free with his love for my work. I think he might even mean it.

I could feel tears pricking at the corners of my eyes and I stared up at the subway map, studying the lines, staring at the crisscrossing of red, blue, yellow and orange.

I think I’m better at critiquing others than producing my own work. Maybe that’s what that column has to finally end with. A final admission that I don’t hurtle into the unknown. I keep happiness at arm’s length, just in case happiness doesn’t look like what I thought of when I was a six year old girl.

I should write that.

As I finally made my way off the sweltering train, my phone buzzed, many times. Mom, Grandma, Mom, Luke, Mom, Mom again . . . I stood in the street, staring at the notifications, and I knew that something had changed in the world.

 

**October 2016**

“Why do we always make love in uncomfortable places?” I murmured. I was safely tucked up in the crook of Jess’s arm, my cheek resting atop his heart and as much of my body on top of his as I could feasibly manage at the end of the jetty. The clothes we’d flung down to protect ourselves from the rough wooden slats had been shifted in our exertions and every stretch of muscle brought the threat of bare skin being brought into contact with the well-worn planks. I don’t know if we’d picked this place because of our history on this still pond, but with the stars above us I felt, yet again, that tickling feeling in the pit of my stomach that this was more fiction than fact.  

Jess laughed, ruefully, and held me tighter. He kissed the top of my head.  “Maybe it’s a metaphor for our catholic guilt,” he murmured.

“Oh I think my life is a metaphor for my catholic guilt,” I muttered, before I could check myself, and in response, Jess’s hand fell to the small of my back, his fingers stroking my skin in spider patterns. It was supposed to be an invitation to explain myself, I could feel it in the gentle pressure against my spine, but I busied my mouth by kissing his the hollow of skin in the middle of his chest.

“What does that mean?” Jess asked when I refused to elaborate.

I thought about a picturesque bed and breakfast in New Hampshire, where I had sat by an open window in the unseasonable heat. I thought about being dressed in fine clothes and kept in the family’s unused house. I thought about the book Jess had suggested, and how editing my life had been so much easier than writing anything new.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” I promised, and I found myself being rolled onto my back, my left shoulder blade pressed against a knot in the planks, while Jess pressed kissed against the side of my neck, and my shoulders, and then down to my stomach, my hips, until his tongue was pushing against parts of me that were too sensitive already.

A better person might have protested and insisted they’d had enough pleasure for one night. I let my head loll backwards and gazed up at the stars and the moon, felt the cool of the night air on my naked skin, and I felt more perfectly content than I had in months.

I could write about this. Or I could try. I could hope to capture something of the heat of Jess’s mouth, and the way he seemed to want to worship me even though he knew me so well. I could try to describe the stars above me and the roughhewn wood beneath me, and the constant lapping of the water against the jetty. I could try to compare this to the night of extravagance Logan had given me, and I would come up short, like I always did.

This would remain unwritten, and as Jess crawled back up to kiss my lips, and hold me tightly once more, I let my eyes close. It would appear in some form in his book, I knew.

And it would never be in mine.

And that was the way it should be.

**Author's Note:**

> Turns out I'm not over this pairing.


End file.
